MASTER 
NEGATIVE 
NO.  91-80387 


MiaiOFILMED  1991 
COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARffiS/NEW  YORK 


as  part  of  the 
''Foundations  of  Western  Civilization  Preservation  Project" 


Funded  bv  the 
NATIONAL  ENDOW^IENT  FOR  THE  HUIvLAMTIES 


Reproductions  may  not  be  made  without  permission  from 

Columbia  University  Library 


COPYRIGHT  STATEMENT 


The  copyright  law  of  the  United  States  ~  Title  17,  United 
States  Code  -  concerns  the  making  of  photocopies  or  other 
reproductions  of  copyrighted  material... 

Columbia  University  Library  reserves  the  right  to  refuse  to 
accept  a  copy  order  if,  in  its  judgement,  fulfillment  of  the  order 
would  involve  violation  of  the  copyright  law. 


AUTHOR: 


MOORE,  CLIFFORD 
HERSCHEL 


TITLE: 


PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 
IMMORTALITY.... 


PLACE: 


CAMBRIDGE 


DA  TE : 


1918 


COLUMBIA  UNTVERSTTY  LIBRARIES 
PRESERVATION  DEPARTMENT 


Master  Negative  # 


BIBLIOGRAPHIC  MICROFORM  TARCFT 


Original  Material  as  Filmed  -  Existing  Bibliographic  Record 


Restrictions  on  Use: 


^igjpMPlii  iiiiF'^  --.^w^— ^jw 


'"rw"  t^v  "■■'  ^ 


yi<""y«i.. 

-4. 


Moore,  Clifford  Herschel,  1866-1931. 

...  Pagan  ideas  of  immortality  during  the  early  Koman 
empire,    by   CliiTord   Herschel   Moore    ...      Cambridge,     I 
Harvard  imiversity  press;  {etc.,  etc.^1918 

4  p.  l,  64  p.    m'"\    (The  Ingersoll  lecture.  1918) 


■ac^p¥--^4n.----GlA-as4^c-0~^|^#«444^^-Re#fii, 


1.  Inirnoriality.        i.  Title. 


Lihrary  of  Congress  >       ]         \.     BD42I.M55 
Copyright     A  501851    .  .^  '^  '  .     '         .. 


18-195S5 


,x'-i, 


TECHNICAL  MICROFORM  DATA 

FILM     SIZE:__,___35}v>_£vi    _  REDUCTION     RATIO; [Ox 

IMAGE  PLACEMENT.    lA    ^  IB     IIB 


DATE     FILMED: / :       "     '  INITIALS      /■  U/'J>, 


HLMEDBY:    RESEARCH  PUBLICATIONS,  INC  WOODBRIDGE.  CT 


r 


Association  for  information  and  image  Management 

1 1 00  Wayne  Avenue.  Suite  1 1 00 
Silver  Spring,  Maryland  20910 

301/587-8202 


Centimeter 

1         2         3 


[ILL 


llllllllllll 


llllllllllllllllllllll 


I 


5        6         7        8         9        10 

iliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiiiiiiliiiiliiiiliiiili 


^n 


1 1 1 


I   I 


11        12       13       14       15    mm 

^MLMhmL^hllllllllllll  llllllllllll 


TTT 


Inches 


.0 


I.I 


.25 


4.5 

150 
ISA 


2.8 


3.2 


3.6 


z:  m 


1.4 


2.5 


2.2 


2.0 


1.8 


1.6 


MfiNUFfiCTURED   TO   OHM  STfiNDRRDS 
BY   fiPPLIED   IMRGE,    INC. 


/ 


v\v?> 


Columbia  ?Hmtier  sitp 

in  ttje  Citp  of  ^t\x>  gork 


LIBRARY 


>  If 

V  .11 

iiii 
•ii.j 


!. '? 


I  111 

■■• 
»«> 

»•' 

;:; 

I::; 

•til 

'•  ji  [ 

iiii 

■»*i 

iSijjl 

•  •H'l 

iiiul 
jiiijl 

jiiiJl 
•Sitil 

iijil 

liiif 
Mil 

ifii 

••••  I 

•iiin 
iti>l 

***  I 

lU'l 

!«{ 

m 

'ill 

Hi 


111 

il 
11 

i 

i<  f 


I 


«  * 


.A 


3njjer00ll  iLecturea  on  Smmortalfts 

IlOfORTALITY     AND     THE     NeW     ThEODICY.       By 

George  A.  Gordon.     1896. 

HuicAN  Immortality.  Two  supposed  Objections 
to  the  Doctrine.     By  William  James.     1897. 

DiONYSOS  AND  IMMORTALITY:  The  Greek  Faith 
in  Immortality  as  affected  by  the  rise  of  Indiv- 
idualism.   By  Benjamin  Ide  Wheeler.     1898. 

The  Conception  of  Immortality.  By  Josiah 
Royce.    1899. 

Lepe  Everlasting.    By  John  Fiske.    1900. 

Science  and  Immortality.  By  William  Osier. 
1904. 

The  Endless  Life.     By  Samuel  M.  Crothers. 

1905. 
Individuality  and  Immortality.     By  Wilhelm 

Ostwald.    X906. 

The  Hope  of  Immortality. 
Dole.      1907. 

Buddhism  and  Immortality. 
Bigelow.     1908. 

--^s   Immortality    Desirable  ? 
Dickinson.     1909. 

Egyptian  Conceptions  of  Immortality. 
George  A.  Reisner.      1911. 

Intimations  of  Immortality  in  the  Sonnets 
of  Shakespeare.  By  George  H.  Palmer. 
1912. 

Metempsychosis.    By  George  Foot  Moore.   1914. 

Pagan  Ideas  of  Immortality  During  the  Early 
Roman  Empire.  By  Clifford  Herschel  Moore. 
1918. 


By   Charles   F. 

By  WiUiam  S. 

By  G.   Lowes 

By 


PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

IMMORTALITY  DURING  THE 

EARLY  ROMAN  EMPIRE 


XEbc  IngcrsoU  Xecture,  1918 


Pagan  Ideas  of 

Immortality  During  the 

Early  Roman  Empire 


By 

Clifford  Herschel  Moore,  Ph.D.,  Litt.D. 

^roftsfr  9f  J^tin  in  Harvard  Univtrsitj 


Cambridge 
Harvard  University  Press 

London:  Humphrey  Milford 

Oxford  University  Press 

I918 


COPYRIGHT,  1918 
HARVARD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 


t9'*fQ^i? 


I 


?7r 


4 


1 


THE  INGERSOLL  LECTURESHIP 

Extract  from  the  will  of  Miss  Caroline  Haskell  IngersoU,  who  died  in 
Keene,  County  of  Cheshire,  New  Hampshire,  Jan,  26,  iSgj 

First.  In  carrying  out  the  wishes  of  my  late  beloved 
father,  George  Goldthwait  IngersoU,  as  declared  by  him 
in  his  last  will  and  testament,  I  give  and  bequeath  to 
Harvard  University  in  Cambridge,  Mass.,  where  my 
late  father  was  graduated,  and  which  he  always  held  in 
love  and  honor,  the  sum  of  Five  thousand  dollars 
($5,000)  as  a  fund  for  the  establishment  of  a  Lectureship 
on  a  plan  somewhat  similar  to  that  of  the  Dudleian 
lecture,  that  is  —  one  lecture  to  be  deHvered  each  year, 
on  any  convenient  day  between  the  last  day  of  May  and 
the  first  day  of  December,  on  this  subject,  "  the  Im- 
mortality of  Man,"  said  lecture  not  to  form  a  part  of 
the  usual  college  course,  nor  to  be  dehvered  by  any 
Professor  or  Tutor  as  part  of  his  usual  routine  of  in- 
struction, though  any  such  Professor  or  Tutor  may  be 
appointed  to  such  service.  The  choice  of  said  lecturer 
is  not  to  be  limited  to  any  one  religious  denomination, 
nor  to  any  one  profession,  but  may  be  that  of  either 
clergyman  or  layman,  the  appointment  to  take  place  at 
least  six  months  before  the  delivery  of  said  lecture. 
The  above  sum  to  be  safely  invested  and  three  fourths 
of  the  annual  interest  thereof  to  be  paid  to  the  lecturer 
for  his  services  and  the  remaining  fourth  to  be  expended 
in  the  publishment  and  gratuitous  distribution  of  the 
lecture,  a  copy  of  which  is  always  to  be  furnished  by 
the  lecturer  for  such  purpose.  The  same  lecture  to  be 
named  and  known  as  "  the  IngersoU  lecture  on  the 
ImmortaUty  of  Man." 


[^ 


«M»> 


PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

IMMORTALITY  DURING  THE 

EARLY  ROMAN  EMPIRE 


THE  invitation  of  the  conmiittee 
charged  with  the  administration 
of  the  Ingersoll  lectureship  and 
my  own  incHnation  have  agreed  in  indi- 
cating that  aspect  of  the  general  subject 
of  immortaUty,  which  I  shall  try  to  pre- 
sent tonight.  I  shall  not  venture  on  this 
occasion  to  advance  arguments  for  or 
against  beUef  in  a  Ufe  after  death;  my 
present  task  is  a  humbler  one :  I  propose 
to  ask  you  to  review  with  me  some  of  the 
more  significant  ideas  concerning  an  ex- 
istence beyond  the  grave,  which  were 
current  in  the  Greco-Roman  world  in 
the  time  of  Jesus  and  during  the  earlier 
Christian    centuries,    and    to    consider 


M 


rs 


!BH99S««S9»m;ii*^-' 


I 


2  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

briefly  the  relation  of  these  pagan  beliefs 
to  Christian  ideas  on  the  same  subject. 
In  dealing  with  a  topic  so  vast  as  this  in 
a  single  hour,  we  must  select  those  ele- 
ments which  historically  showed  them- 
selves to  be  fundamental  and  vital;  but 
even  then  we  cannot  examine  much  de- 
tail. It  may  prove,  however,  that  a  rapid 
survey  of  those  concepts  of  the  future 
life,  whose  influence  lasted  long  during 
the  Christian  centuries,  and  indeed  has 
continued  to  the  present  day,  may  not  be 
without  profit. 

The  most  important  single  religious 
document  from  the  Augustan  Age  is  the 
sixth  book  of  Virgil's  Aeneid;  for  al- 
though the  Aeneid  was  written  primarily 
to  glorify  Roman  imperial  aims,  the  sixth 
book  gives  full  expression  to  many  phi- 
losophic and  popular  ideas  of  the  other 
world  and  of  the  future  life,  which  were 
current  among  both  Greeks  and  Romans.-^ 
It  therefore  makes  a  fitting  point  of  depar- 


I 


i 


IMMORTALITY  3 

ture  for  our  considerations.  In  this  book, 
as  you  will  remember,  the  poet's  hero, 
having  reached  Italian  soil  at  last,  is  led 
down  to  the  lower  world  by  the  Cumaean 
Sybil.  This  descent  to  Hades  belongs 
historically  to  that  long  series  of  apoc- 
alyptic writings  which  begins  with  the 
eleventh  book  of  the  Odyssey  and  closes 
with  Dante's  Divine  Comedy.  Warde 
Fowler  deserves  credit  for  clearly  point- 
uig^t  that  this  visit  of  Aeneas  to 
the  world  below  is  the  final  ordeal  for 
him,  a  mystic  initiation,  in  which  he 
receives  "  enlightenment  for  the  toil, 
peril,  and  triumph  that  await  him  in 
the  accomplishment  of  his  divine  mis- 
sion." When  the  Trojan  hero  has  learned 
from  his  father's  shade  the  mysteries 
of  life  and  death,  and  has  been  taught 
the  magnitude  of  the  work  which  lies 
before  him,  and  the  great  things  that 
are  to  be,  he  casts  off  the  timidity  which 
he  has  hitherto  shown  and,  strengthened 


4  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

by  his  experiences,  advances  to  the  per- 
fect accomplishment  of  his  task.^ 

But  we  are  not  concerned  so  much  with 
Virgil's  purpose  in  writing  this  apocalyp- 
tic book,  as  with  its  contents  and  with 
the  evidence  it  gives  as  to  the  current 
ideas  of  the  other  world  and  the  fate  of 
the  human  soul.  What  then  does  the 
poet  tell  us  of  these  great  matters  ?  We 
can  hardly  do  better  than  to  follow  Ae- 
neas and  his  guide  on  their  journey.  This 
side  of  Acheron  they  meet  the  souls  of 
those  whose  bodies  are  unburied,  and 
who  therefore  must  tarry  a  hundred  years 
—  the  maximum  of  human  life  —  before 
they  may  be  ferried  over  the  river  which 
bounds  Hades.  When  Charon  has  set 
the  earthly  visitors  across  that  stream, 
they  find  themselves  in  a  place  where  are 
gathered  spirits  of  many  kinds,  who  have 
not  yet  been  admitted  to  Tartarus  or 
Elysium:  first  the  souls  of  infants  and 
those  who  met  their  end  by  violence  — 


4 


» 


» 


IMMORTALITY  5 

men  condemned  to  death  though  inno- 
cent, suicides,  those  who  died  for  love, 
and  warriors  —  all  of  whom  must  here 
wait  until  the  span  of  life  allotted  them 
has  been  completed.  These  spirits  passed, 
the  mortal  visitors  come  to  the  walls  of 
Tartarus,  on  whose  torments  Aeneas  is 
not  allowed  to  look,  for 

"  The  feet  of  innocence  may  never  pass 
Into  this  house  of  sin.^' 

But  the  Sybil,  herself  taught  by  Hecate, 
reveals  to  him  the  eternal  punishments 
there  inflicted  for  monstrous  crimes. 
Then  the  visitors  pass  to  Elysium,  where 
dwell  the  souls  of  those  whose  deserts  on 
earth  have  won  for  them  a  happy  lot. 
Nearby  in  a  green  valley,  Aeneas  finds 
the  shade  of  his  own  father,  Anchises, 
looking  eagerly  at  the  souls  which  are 
waiting  to  be  born  into  the  upper  world. 
In  answer  to  his  son's  questions,  the 
heroic  shade  discloses  the  doctrine  of 
rebirths  —  metempsychosis  —  with    its 


f 


) 


6  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

tenets  of  penance  and  of  purification.^ 
Finally,  to  fulfill  the  poet's  purpose, 
Anchises'  spirit  points  out  the  souls  of 
the  heroes  who  are  to  come  on  earth  in 
due  season;  the  spirits  of  future  Romans 
pass  before  Aeneas  in  long  array;  and  at 
the  climax  he  sees  the  soul  of  Augustus, 
that  prince  who  was  destined  in  the  full- 
ness of  time  to  bring  back  the  Golden 
Age  and  to  impose  peace  on  the  wide 
world.  This  prophetic  revelation  ended, 
Aeneas  enlightened  and  strengthened  for 
his  task,  returns  to  the  upper  world. 

This  book  seems  at  first  a  strange  com- 
pound indeed  of  popular  belief,  philoso- 
phy, and  theology,  which  is  not  without 
its  contradictions.  On  these,  however, 
we  need  not  pause ;  but  for  our  present 
interest  we  must  ask  what  are  the  main 
ideas  on  which  this  apocalypse  is  based. 
First  of  all,  a  future  Ufe  is  taken  for 
granted  by  the  poet ;  otherwise  the  book 
could  never  have  been  written.     Sec- 


'I 


t 


IMMORTALITY  7 

ondly,  we  notice  that,  according  to  an- 
cient popular  belief,  the  souls  of  those  who 
had  not  received  the  proper  burial  rites, 
were  doomed  to  wander  on  this  side  of 
Acheron  until  a  hundred  years  were  com- 
pleted, and  also  that  souls  which  were 
disembodied  by  violence  or  by  early 
death,  were  destined  to  live  out  their  al- 
lotted span  of  earthly  existence  before 
they  could  enter  the  inner  precincts  of 
Hades.  Again  the  poet  represents  some 
few  as  suflfering  eternal  torments  for  their 
monstrous  sins  or  enjoying  immortal  bliss 
because  of  their  great  deserts.  And  fi- 
nally, he  shows  that  the  majority  of  souls 
must  pass  through  successive  lives  and 
deaths,  until,  purified  from  the  sin  and 
dross  of  the  body  by  millennial  sojourns 
in  the  world  below,  and  by  virtuous  lives 
on  earth,  they  at  last  find  repose  and  sat- 
isfaction. The  popular  beliefs  which  con- 
cern details  of  the  future  life  we  shall 
leave  one  side  for  the  moment;   let  us 


(i: 


!i 


8  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

rather  first  observe  that  Virgil's  ideas  as 
to  rewards  and  punishments  in  the  next 
world,  as  well  as  his  doctrine  of  succes- 
sive rebirths  and  deaths  with  their  ac- 
companying purifications,  rest  on  a  moral 
basis,  so  that  the  other  world  is  con- 
ceived to  be  a  complement  of  this:  life 
on  earth  and  fife  below  are  opportunities 
for  moral  advance  without  which  final 
happiness  cannot  be  attained.  Whence 
came  these  ideas  of  the  future  life  and 
how  far  were  they  current  in  the  ancient 
world  of  Virgil's  day  ? 

Naturally  it  does  not  follow  that,  be- 
cause Rome's  greatest  poet  chose  to 
picture  souls  surviving  their  corporeal 
homes,  the  average  man  believed  in  a 
future  life,  but  there  is  abundant  evi- 
dence that  the  poet  was  appealing  to 
widespread  beliefs,  when  he  wrote  his 
apocalyptic  book.^  In  fact  from  the  earli- 
est times  known  to  us,  both  Greeks  and 
Romans  held  to  a  belief  in  some  kind  of 


IMMORTALITY  9 

extended  life  for  souls  after  the  death 
of  the  body.^  Both  peoples  had  their 
cults  of  the  dead,  rites  of  tendance  and 
of  riddance,  festivals  both  pubUc  and  pri- 
vate, which  leave  no  doubt  that  the  great 
majority  of  men  never  questioned  that 
the  spirits  of  the  departed  existed  after 
this  life,  and  that  those  spirits  were  en- 
dowed with  power  to  harm  or  to  bless 
the  living.^  But  beyond  this  rather  ele- 
mentary stage  of  belief  the  Romans  never 
went  of  themselves.  The  Greeks,  how- 
ever, began  early  to  develop  eschatologi- 
cal  ideas  which  had,  and  which  still  have, 
great  importance. 

The  eleventh  book  of  the  Odyssey,  as  I 
have  already  said,  is  the  oldest  ^'  Descent 
to  Hades  "  in  European  literature.  The 
souls  of  the  dead  are  there  represented  as 
dwelling  in  the  land  of  shadows,  having 
no  life,  but  leading  an  insubstantial  ex- 
istence, without  punishment  or  reward. 
Such  a  future  world  could  have  no  moral 


lO 


PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

or  other  value;  it  could  only  hang  over 
men  as  a  gloomy  prospect  of  that  which 
awaited  them  when  the  suns  of  this  world 
had  forever  set.  But  in  the  seventh  and 
sixth  centuries  B.C.  other  ideas  came  to 
the  front,  which  were  influential  through- 
out later  history.  In  those  two  centuries 
fall  the  first  period  of  Greek  individual- 
ism and  a  religious  revival  —  two  things 
not  wholly  disconnected.  The  Orphic 
sect,which  appeared  in  the  sixth  century, 
was  made  up  of  religious  devotees  who 
adopted  a  purified  form  of  the  religion  of 
Dionysus.^  The  center  of  the  Orphic 
faith  and  mystic  ceremonial  was  the 
myth  of  the  birth,  destruction,  and  re- 
birth of  the  god.  According  to  the  story, 
Dionysus  was  pursued  by  the  Titans, 
powers  hostile  to  Zeus.  In  his  distress 
the  god  changed  himself  into  various 
creatures,  finally  taking  on  the  form  of  a 
bull,  which  the  Titans  tore  in  pieces  and 
devoured.  But  the  goddess  Athena  saved 


IMMORTALITY  ii 

the  heart  and  gave  it  to  Zeus  who  swal- 
lowed it.  Hence  sprang  the  new  Diony- 
sus. The  Titans  Zeus  destroyed  with  his 
thunderbolt  and  had  the  ashes  scattered 
to  the  winds.  From  these  ashes,  in  one 
form  of  the  myth,  man  was  made,  and 
therefore  he  was  thought  to  unite  in  his 
person  the  sinful  Titanic  nature  and  the 
divine  Dionysiac  spark.  The  parallel- 
ism between  this  story  and  the  myths  of 
Osiris,  Attis,  and  Adonis  is  at  once  evi- 
dent. They  are  all  gods  who  die  and  live 
again,  and  thus  become  lords  of  death 
and  life,  through  whom  man  gains  as- 
surance of  his  own  immortality. 

Our  chief  concern  with  the  Orphics 
here  is  that  they  seem  to  have  introduced 
among  the  Greeks  the  idea  that  the  soul 
of  man  was  divine,  was  a  dalfjLO)v  which 
had  fallen,  and  for  its  punishment  was 
imprisoned  in  the  body  as  in  a  tomb.  In 
its  corporeal  cell  it  was  condemned  to 
suffer  defilement  until  released  by  death, 


12  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

when  it  passed  to  Hades.  Its  lot  there 
depended  on  its  Hfe  on  earth.  As  an 
OrphicJiagment  says:  "  They  who  are 
righteous  beneath  the  rays  of  the  sun, 
when  they  die,  have  a  gentler  lot  in  a  fair 
meadow  by  deep  flowing  Acheron.  .  .  . 
But  they  who  have  worked  wrong  and 
insolence  under  the  rays  of  the  sun  are 
led  down  beneath  Cocytu^s  watery  plain 
into  chill  Tartarus.''^  p^he  soul's  so- 
journ in  Hades  therefore  was  a  time  of 
punishment  and  of  purification,  even  as 
life  itself  was  a  penance  for  sinj  Accord- 
ing to  a  common  beUef ,  at  least  m  Plato's 
day,  after  a  thousand  years  the  soul 
entered  a  new  incarnation,  and  so  on 
through  ten  rounds  of  earth  and  Hades, 
until  at  last,  freed  from  sin  and  earthly 
dross  by  faithful  observance  of  a  holy 
life  on  earth  and  by  the  purification 
which  it  underwent  below,  it  returned  to 
its  divine  abode;  but  those  who  per- 
sisted in  sin  were  condemned  to  all  the 


i 


IMMORTALITY  13 

punishments  which  man's  imagination 
could  devise;  the  wicked  were  doomed 
to  lie  in  mud  and  filth,  while  evil  demons 
rent  their  vitals.  Indeed  the  horrors 
which  the  medieval  Christian  loved  to 
depict  in  order  to  terrify  the  wicked  and 
to  rejoice  the  faithful,  were  first  de- 
vised by  the  Orphics  and  their  heirs, 
for  exactly  the  same  purpose. 

But  what  bases  did  the  Orphics  find 
for  their  belief  in  the  dmnenatureof  the 
soul  ?  In  their  mythology  they  had  said 
that  man  was  created  out  of  the  ashes  of 
the  Titans  in  which  a  spark  of  Dionysus 
still  remained.  But  in  fact  they  seem  to 
have  rested  on  faith  or  intuition,  without 
working  out  clearly  a  philosophic  answer. 
They  were  indeed  deeply  conscious  of 
man's  dual  nature;  they  perceived  that 
on  the  one  hand  he  is  pulled  by  his  baser 
instincts  and  desires,  which  they  natu- 
rally attributed  to  the  body,  and  that  on 
the  other  hand  he  is  prompted  by  nobler 


\t 


14  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

aspirations,  which  they  assigned  to  his 
soul.  This  higher  part  of  man's  dual  self 
was,  for  them,  the  Dionysiac  element  in 
him.  And  man's  moral  obhgation  they 
held  to  be  to  free  this  divine  element 
from  the  clogging  weight  of  the  body,  to 
cease  to  "  blind  his  soul  with  clay."  So 
far  as  we  are  aware,  the  QjEhics  were 
the  first  among  the  Greeks  to  make  the 
divimtFof  the  soul  a  motive  for  the  re- 
ligious  Ufe,  and  perhaps  the  first  to  see 
thatTTTthe  soul  is  divine,  it  may  natu- 
rally be  regarded  as  eternally  so,  and 
therefore  as  immortal.  What  more  mo- 
mentous thoughts  as  to  the  soul's  nature 
and  its  destiny  could  any  sect  have  in- 
troduced than  these  ?  They  were  shared 
by  their  contemporaries,  the  Pythago- 
reans; in  fact  it  is  hard  to  say  with 
certainty  which  sect  developed  these  con- 
cepts first.^ 

But   the   Orphic-Pythagorean   confi- 
dence in  the  inamortality  of  the  soul  was 


IMMORTALITY  IS 

at  the  most  only  an  emotional  belief.  It 
remained  for  Plato  in"^he  early  fourth 
century  to  give  that  beUef  a  philosophic 
basis  and  thereby  to  transform  it  into  a 
reasonable  article  of  religion.    This  he 
fundamentally  did,  when  he  brought  his 
concept  of  the  reasoning  soul  into  con- 
nection with  his  doctrine  of ''  forms  "  or 
''  ideas."     He  maintained  that  behind 
this  transient  phenomenal  world  known 
to  us  through  the  senses,  Hes  another 
world,  the  world  of  ideas,  invisible,  per- 
manent, and  real,  which  can  be  grasped 
by  the  reason  only.    These  permanent 
ideas,  he  said,  are  of  various  grades  and 
degrees,  the  supreme  idea  being  that  of 
the  Good  and  the  Beautiful,  which  is  the 
cause  of  all  existence,  truth,  and  knowl- 
edge;   it   at   once   comprehends   these 
things  within  itself  and  is  superior  to 
them;  it  is  the  Absolute,  God.^° 

But  all  the  ideas,  including  the  Abso- 
lute, are,  as  I  have  just  said,  appre- 


il. 


/ 


i6  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

hended  not  by  man's  senses  but  by  his 
intellect.  Therefore,  argues  Plato,  man's 
reasoning  soul  must  have  the  same  na- 
ture as  the  ideas;  like  them,  it  must  be- 
long to  the  world  above  the  senses  and 
with  them  it  must  partake  of  the  Abso- 
lute. Moreover,  since  the  ideas  are  eter- 
nal and  immortal,  it  inevitably  follows 
that  man's  reasoning  soul  has  existed 
from  eternity  and  will  exist  forever.^^ 

This  is  not  the  occasion  to  discuss  the 
vaHdity  of  Plato's  doctrine.  Aristotle 
stated,  once  for  all,  the  fundamental  ob- 
jections to  his  teacher's  views.'^  But  we 
shall  readily  grant  that,  if  we  accept 
Plato's  doctrine,  his  conclusions  as  to  the 
immortality  of  the  soul  may  logically 
follow  and  that  no  further  evidence  is 
needed  to  convince  us.  Yet  Plato  was 
not  content  to  let  the  matter  rest  on  this 
single  argument,  for  in  other  dialogues 
he  adduces  proofs  which  do  not  seem  so 
convincing  to  us  as  to  their  author.    He 


1 


IMMORTALITY  i? 

attempts  to  prove  immortality  from  the 
self-motion  of  the  soul,  again  from  the 
dim  recollections  out  of  an  earlier  exist- 
ence which  enable  one  to  recall  axio- 
matic truths  or  to  recognize  relations,  as 
in  mathematics  —  things  which  one  has 
never  learned  in  this  present  life.  On 
another  occasion  he  argues  from  the  un- 
changing nature  of  the  soul  and  from  the 
soul's  superiority  to  the  body.  But  he 
seems  to  have  thought  the  most  convinc- 
ing proof  was  the  fact  that  the  notion  of 
life  is  inseparable  from  our  concept  of 
the  soul;  that  is,  a  dead  soul  is  unthink- 
able. For  all  these  reasons,  therefore,  he 
argued  that  the  soul  must  be  immortal." 
Whatever  we  may  think  of  Plato's  dif- 
ferent proofs,  they  have  furnished  the 
armories  of  apologists  ahnost  down  to 
our  own  day.  In  antiquity  they  were 
constantly  repeated,  in  whole  or  in  part, 
not  only  by  devoted  members  of  the 
Academy  and  later  by  the  Neoplatonists, 


'^vs^m:^!»'^-i<iim^t'^' 


i8  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

but  by  the  Eclectics  and  others,  like 
Cicero  in  the  first  book  of  his  Tusculan 
Disputations,  and  at  the  close  of  Scipio's 
Dream;    they  were  borrowed  by  the 
Stoics,  and  some  eight  hundred  years 
after  Plato  had  first  formulated  them, 
they  were  employed  by  St.  Augustine  in 
his  tract  De  Immortalitate  Animae.   The 
religious  intuition  of  the  Orphic  and  Py- 
thagorean then  was  given  a  rational  basis 
by  Plato,  and  thus  supported,  proved  so 
convincing   to    antiquity    that   Plato's 
views  were  the  most  important  of  all  in 
supporting  belief  in  the  soul's  immortal- 
ity.   They  were  in  large  measure  taken 
up  by  the  Christian  church,  and,  as  has 
been  often  shown,  the  doctrine  of  a  spirit- 
ual immortaUty  apart  and  free  from  the 
body,  was  of  immense  service  to  primi- 
tive Christianity,  when  the  hope  of  the 
early  return  of  Christ  to  found  a  new 
kingdom    on    earth    faded   before    the 
lengthening  years. 


IMMORTALITY  19 

To  Plato  himself  his  beHef  in  immor- 
tahty  was  of  the  greatest  moment,  for 
the  whole  fabric  of  his  ethical  and  poUti- 
cal  philosophy  is  built  against  the  back- 
ground of  that  doctrine.  And  indeed  we 
should  all  grant  much  validity  to  the 
argument  that  the  human  reason,  though 
weak  and  limited,  is  one  with  the  divine 
and  infinite  reason;  otherwise  the  hu- 
man could  have  no  understanding  of  the 
divine.  But  when  it  is  further  argued 
that  if  the  human  reason  is  of  the  same 
nature  with  the  divine,  it  must  be  eternal 
and  immortal,  we  may  reply  that,  even 
so,  we  are  not  convinced  that  the  individ- 
ual soul  must  therefore  have  a  conscious 
and  separate  existence  through  all  eter- 
nity; its  identity  may  be  lost  by  ab- 
sorption into  the  universal  reason,  the 
supreme  idea.  This  is  a  matter  on  which 
Plato  nowhere  delivers  a  clear  opinion, 
but  his  thought  is  so  plainly  centered  on 
the  individual  soul  that  we  can  hardly 


20  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

believe  that  it  was  possible  for  him  to 
conceive  of  the  soul's  personality  ever 
being  lost  in  the  Absolute. 

Although  Plato  and  his  greatest  pupil, 
Aristotle,  regarded  man's  reasoning  soul 
as  spiritual,  something  distinct  from 
matter,  few  ancient  thinkers  were  able 
to  rise  to  the  concept  of  the  inmiaterial- 
ity  of  man's  reasoning  nature.  The 
Stoics,  who  in  their  eclectic  system  bor- 
rowed from  both  Plato  and  Aristotle,  as 
well  as  from  many  other  predecessors, 
held  to  a  strict  materialism  which  they 
took  from  HeracUtus.  But  to  their  ma- 
terial principle  they  applied  a  concept 
which  they  took  from  Aristotle,  for  they 
recognized  in  all  things  the  existence  of 
an  active  and  a  passive  principle,  and 
they  said  that  by  the  action  of  the  former 
on  the  latter,  all  phenomena  were  pro- 
duced. The  active  principle  they  called 
reason,  intelligence,  the  cause  of  all 
things.    It  was  the  world-reason  which, 


IMMORTALITY  2i 

according  to  their  view,  permeated  every 
part  of  the  cosmos,  causing  and  directing 
all  things.  To  express  their  concept  of 
its  nature,  they  often  named  it  Fire,  the 
most  powerful  and  active  of  the  elements, 
or  rather  the  primordial  element;  again 
they  often  called  it  God,  for  they  did  not 
hesitate  to  speak  of  this  immanent  prin- 
ciple as  a  person.  Furthermore,  since 
man  is  a  part  of  the  cosmos,  the  world- 
reason  expresses  itself  in  him.  Indeed 
man's  reason,  the  directing  element  of 
the  human  soul,  is  itself  a  part  of  the 
world-reason,  or  in  Epictetus'  striking 
phrase,  man  is  "  a  fragment  of  God."  ^* 
At  this  point  the  Stoic  and  the  Platonist 
were  in  accord,  although  the  paths  of 
thought  which  they  had  travelled  were 
very  different.  Yet  the  Stoic  could  not 
agree  with  the  Platonist  that  the  individ- 
ual soul  survived  forever,  since  he  held 
to  a  cycHcal  theory  of  the  cosmos,  ac- 
cording to  which  this  present  universe 


k 


22  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

was  temporal.  It  had  been  created  by 
the  eternal  fire,  by  the  world-reason, 
from  itself,  and  it  was  destined  in  due 
season  to  sink  back  again  into  universal 
fire.  Meantime,  according  to  the  views 
of  most  Stoics,  the  souls  of  the  just  would 
survive  this  body,  ascending,  to  the 
spheres  above  the  world,  where  they 
would  dwell  until  absorbed  once  more 
into  the  divine  element  from  which  they 
sprang.  To  the  souls  of  the  wicked  only 
a  short  period  at  most  of  post-corporeal 
existence  was  granted  —  brevity  of  life 
or  annihilation  was  their  punishment.^^ 

Strictly  speaking,  the  prospect  of  the 
limited  existence  after  death,  which  the 
Stoics  held  out  as  virtue's  reward,  should 
have  had  little  value  for  the  philosophic 
mind,  especially  as  their  philosophy  of- 
fered no  warrant  that  personaKty  would 
survive  at  all.  But  it  would  seem  that 
men  at  every  period  of  human  history 
have  had  immortal  longings  in  them  so 


IMMORTALITY  23 

strong  that  they  have  eagerly  embraced 
the  assurance  of  even  a  brief  respite  from 
annihilation;  certain  it  is  that  to  many 
Greeks  and  Romans  the  Stoic  doctrine 
of  a  limited  existence  after  death  was  a 
strong  incentive  to  virtue  and  a  conso- 
lation in  the  midst  of  this  world's  trials. 
But  no  doctrine  of  the  post-corporeal 
existence  of  the  soul  has  ever  had  the 
field  entirely  to  itself.  We  know  that  in 
antiquity  even  the  Stoic  conception  of 
the  soul's  limited  survival,  to  say  noth- 
ing of  Platonic  beUef  s  in  actual  immortal- 
ity, met  with  much  opposition  and  denial 
among  the  intellectual  classes.  The  Epi- 
cureans, with  their  thorough-going  atom- 
istic materialism,  would  not  allow  that 
the  soul  had  any  existence  apart  from  the 
body;  on  the  contrary,  they  held  that 
the  soul  came  into  being  at  the  moment 
of  conception,  grew  with  the  body,  and, 
at  the  body's  death,  was  once  more  dis- 
solved into  the  atoms  from  which  it  first 


24  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

was  formed.    Epicurean  polemics  were 
directed  against  both  popular  supersti- 
tions and  Platonic  metaphysics;    the 
attacks  had  the  advantage  of  offering 
rational,  and  for  the  day  scientific,  ex- 
planations of  natural  phenomena,  which 
fed  human  curiosity  as  to  the  causes  of 
things,  and  which,  if  accepted,  might 
logically  lead  to  that  freedom  from  the 
soul's  perturbation  which  was  the  aim 
of  the  teaching.     Moreover,  the  noble 
resignation,  the  high  moral  and  humane 
zeal,  which  characterized  the  Epicurean 
School  at  its  best,  as  well  as  its  easy  de- 
cUne  into  hedonistic  appeals,  made  it 
popular,  especially  in  the  last  two  cen- 
turies before  our  era.    But  the  very  fire 
and  passion  of  Lucretius,  its  most  gifted 
Latin  exponent,  give  us  the  impression 
that  after  all  most  men  were  not  moved 
to  find  the  peace  which  the  poet  prom- 
ised them,  if  they  would  but  accept  the 
doctrine  of  the  souFs  dissolution  at  the 
moment  of  death. 


IMMORTALITY  25 

The  Sceptics  also,  who  claimed  not  an 
inconsiderable  number  of  intellectuals, 
doubted  the  possibility  of  a  future  life, 
or  found  themselves  unable  to  decide  the 
matter  at  all.  Like  Tennyson's  Sage 
they  would  declare : 

"Thou  canst  not  prove  that  thou  art  body 
alone, 
Nor  canst  thou  prove  that  thou  art  spirit 

alone, 
Nor  canst  thou  prove  that  thou  art  both  in 

one: 
Thou  canst  not  prove  that  thou  art  immortal, 

no, 
Nor  yet  that  thou  art  mortal." 

Indeed  it  is  true  that  of  all  the  philo- 
sophic sects  at  the  beginning  of  our 
era,  only  those  which  were  imbued  with 
Platonic  and  Orphic-Pythagorean  ideas, 
had  confidence  in  the  soul's  immortal- 
ity. The  Stoic  position  we  have  already 
discussed.  Some  scholars,  following 
Rohde,^®  claim  that  there  was  Uttle  be- 


i(i 


i 


I 


26  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

lief  in  any  kind  of  a  future  life  among  the 
educated  classes  at  the  time  we  are  con- 
sidering; this  I  hold  to  be  an  error,  al- 
though it  is  certain  that  the  Epicureans 
and  Sceptics  had  a  large  following.  In 
any  case  we  need  to  remind  ourselves 
that  the  intellectuals  are  always  a  small 
minority,  whose  views  may  not  represent 
in  any  way  popular  beliefs. 

We  are,  however,  not  without  evidence 
that  there  were  doubters  among  the  com- 
mon people.  Flippant  epigrams  and 
epitaphs  show  that  men  could  at  least 
assume  a  cynicism  toward  life  and  a  light- 
heartedness  toward  death  which  equal 
Lucian's.  More  than  once  we  can  read 
funerary  inscriptions  to  this  effect:  ''  I 
was  nothing,  I  am  nothing.  Do  thou 
who  art  still  alive,  eat,  drink,  be  merry, 
come."  ^^  Or  sentiments  like  this: ''  Once 
I  had  no  existence;  now  I  have  none. 
I  am  not  aware  of  it.  It  does  not  concern 
me."^^    Again  we  find  the  denial :  "In 


I 


IMMORTALITY  27 

Hades  there  is  no  boat,  no  Charon,  no 
Aeacus  who  holds  the  keys,  no  Cerberus. 
All  of  us,  whom  death  has  taken  away 
are  rotten  bones  and  ashes;  nothing 
more."^^  The  sentiments  are  perhaps  as 
old  as  thinking  man.  They  have  at 
times  touches  of  humor  which  call  forth 
a  smile,  as  in  the  anxious  inquiries  of 
Callimachus'  epigram:  "  Charidas,  what 
is  below  ?  "  ''  Deep  darkness."  "  But 
what  of  the  paths  upward  ?  "  "  All  a 
lie."  "  And  Pluto  ?  "  "  Mere  talk." 
"  Then  we  're  lost."  ^o 

Such  expressions,  of  course,  must  not  be 
given  too  much  weight  in  our  reckoning. 
The  longing  for  annihilation,  which  ap- 
peals at  times  to  most  weary  mortals, 
also  led  to  dedications  ''  to  eternal  rest  " 
or  ''  to  eternal  sleep."  ^^  But  after  all 
the  number  of  such  epitaphs  is  compar- 
atively small.  In  the  nature  of  the 
case  many  funerary  inscriptions  give  no 
testimony   for  or  against   a  beUef  in 


28  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

immortality;    but  large  numbers  show 
confidence,  or  a  hope,  in  a  future  life. 

II 

The  time  has  now  come  for  us  to  re- 
turn from  our  rather  long  historical  sur- 
vey to  Virgil's  Apocalypse,  and  to  Usten 
to  the  words  with  which  Anchises'  shade 
taught  his  eager  son : 

"  Know  first  that  heaven  and  earth  and  ocean's 
plain, 
The  moon's  bright  orb,  and  stars  of  Titan 

birth 
Are  nourished  by  one  Life;  one  primal  Mind, 
Immingled  with  the  vast  and  general  frame, 
Fills  every  part  and  stirs  the  mighty  whole. 
Thence  man  and  beast,  thence  creatures  of 

the  air. 
And  all  the  swarming  monsters  that  be  found 
Beneath  the  level  of  the  marbled  sea; 
A  fiery  virtue,  a  celestial  power. 
Their  native  seeds  retain;  but  bodies  vile. 
With  limbs  of  clay  and  members  born  to  die, 
Encumber  and  o'ercloud;  whence  also  spring 
Terrors  and  passions,  suffering  and  joy; 


IMMORTALITY 


29 


I 


For  from  deep  darkness  and  captivity 
All  gaze  but  blindly  on  the  radiant  world. 
Nor  when  to  life's  last  beam  they  bid  farewell 
May  sufferers  cease  from  pain,  nor  quite  be 

freed 
From  all  their  fleshly  plagues;  but  by  fixed 

law. 
The  strange,  inveterate  taint  works  deeply  m. 
For  this,  the  chastisement  of  evils  past 
Is  suffered  here,  and  full  requital  paid. 
Some  hang  on  high,  outstretched  to  viewless 

winds; 
For  some  their  sin's  contagion  must  be  purged 
In  vast  ablution  of  deep-rolling  seas, 
Or  burned  away  in  fire.    Each  man  receives 
His  ghostly  portion  in  the  world  of  dark; 
But  thence  to  realms  Elysian  we  go  free, 
Where  for  a  few  these  seats  of  bUss  abide. 
Till  time's  long  lapse  a  perfect  orb  fulfills. 
And  takes  all  taint  away,  restoring  so 
The  pure,  ethereal  soul's  first  virgin  fire. 
At  last,  when  the  miUennial  aeon  strikes, 
God  calls  them  forth  to  yon  Lethaean  stream. 
In  numerous  host,  that  thence,  oblivious  all, 
They  may   behold  once  more  the  vaulted 

skv 
And  wiUmgly  to  shapes  of  flesh  return."  ^ 


«t 


/ 


f 


30  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

These  words  express  the  commingled  be- 
Hefs  of  Orphic,  Pythagorean,  Platonist, 
and  Stoic.  How  extensively  such  beliefs 
were  held  by  VirgiFs  contemporaries  we 
cannot  say  with  accuracy,  but  certain  it 
is  that  this  book  and  this  passage  would 
never  have  made  the  religious  appeal 
which  they  made  in  antiquity,  if  they 
had  not  corresponded  to  widespread  con- 
victions. 

But  Virgil's  sixth  book  contains  much 
more  than  the  eschatological  views  of 
philosophic  schools;  it  reflects  to  an  ex- 
traordinary degree  popular  ideas  and 
practices.  I  have  already  referred  to  the 
fact  that  it  represents  a  mystic  initiation 
of  Virgil's  hero  as  preparation  for  his 
holy  task.  Now  we  know  that  at  all 
times  the  convictions  of  the  majority  of 
men  are  founded  not  on  the  arguments 
which  thinkers  can  supply,  but  on  hopes, 
intuitions,  and  emotional  experiences. 
Such  were  the  grounds  on  which  the 


IMMORTALITY  31 

Orphic  built  his  hope  of  the  purified 
souFs  ultimate  happiness.    More  popu- 
lar than  Orphism  were  the  Greek  mys- 
teries, of  which  the  most  important  were 
those  celebrated  annually  at  Eleusis  in 
Attica.    There  the  story  of  the  rape  of 
Proserpina,  of  Demeter's  search  for  her 
daughter,  and  of  the  daughter's  recov- 
ery, formed  the  center  of  a  mystic  cere- 
monial.   Originally  these  mysteries  were 
no  doubt  agricultural  rites  intended  to 
call  to  life  the  dead  grain  in  the  spring. 
But  before  the  seventh  century,  B.C., 
the  festival  had  been  transformed;  the 
miracle  of  the  reviving  vegetation,  of 
the  grain  which  dies  and  Uves  again, 
here,  as  so  many  times  elsewhere,  had 
become  the  symbol  and  assurance  of 
human  immortality.^^ 
Before  adnussion  to  the  annual  cele- 

brafion*^the  would-be  initiate  was  duly 
purified.  During  the  celebration  the  in- 
itiated, by  their  own  acts,  recalled  Deme- 


32  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

ter's  hunt  for  her  daughter,  roaming  the 
shore  with  Hghted  torches ;  like  the  god- 
dess, they  fasted  and  then  broke  their 
fast  by  drinking  a  holy  potion  of  meal 
and  water;  in  the  great  hall  of  initiation 
they  witnessed  a  mystic  drama,  perhaps 
saw  holy  objects  exhibited  and  explained. 
In  any  case  they  underwent  an  emotional 
experience  which  so  confirmed  their  in- 
tuitional beUef  in  immortality,  that  they 
were  confident  of  peace  and  happiness 
in  this  life  and  of  blessedness  in  the  life 
to  come,  where  they  would  join  in  the 
sacred  dance,  while  the  uninitiated  would 
be  wretched.  Many  are  the  expressions 
of  this  ecclesiastical  confidence.  The 
Homeric  hymn  of  Demeter  promised: 
"  Blessed  is  he  among  mortal  men  who 
has  seen  these  rites."  ^^  Pindar,  early  in 
the  fifth  century,  wrote:  "Happy  he 
who  has  seen  these  things  and  then  goes 
beneath  the  earth,  for  he  knows  the  end 
of  Ufe  and  its  Zeus-given  beginning."  ^^ 


IMMORTALITY  33 

Sophocles  said:  ''Thrice  blessed  are  they 
who  have  seen  these  rites,  and  then  go 
to  the  house  of  Hades,  for  they  alone 
have  Ufe  there,  but  all  others  have  only 
woe."  ^^  At  the  close  of  the  fifth  cen- 
tury Aristophanes  made  his  chorus  of 
mystae  sing:  ''  For  we  alone  have  a  sun 
and  a  holy  light,  we  who  have  been  initi- 
ated, and  who  live  honorably  toward 
friends  and  strangers,  reverencing  the 
gods."  ^^  In  the  third  century  of  the 
Christian  era,  an  official  of  the  mysteries 
set  up  an  inscription  which  declares: 
''  Verily  glorious  is  that  mystery  vouch- 
safed by  the  blessed  gods,  for  death  is  no 
ill  for  mortals,  but  rather  a  good."  ^^ 

It  is  difficult  for  us  now  to  appreci- 
ate the  widespread  influence  of  these 
Eleusinian  mysteries.  They  had  many 
branches;  at  Eleusis  they  continued  to 
be  celebrated  until  396  A.D.,  when  Ala- 
ric  the  Goth  destroyed  Demeter's  an- 
cient shrine.    Other  Greek  mysteries  also 


\  't 


tf 


34  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

flourished  in  the  Mediterranean  world: 
those  of  Samothrace;  the  mysteries  of 
Bacchus,  whose  excesses  brought  down 
the  displeasure  of  the  Roman  Senate  in 
1 86  B.C.;  and  in  later  times  the  mys- 
teries of  Hecate  or  Diana.  All  had  this 
in  common,  that  they  gave  the  initiate 
assurance  of  a  happy  immortality. 

Under  the  Roman  Empire  the  longing 
for  religious  satisfaction  through  mystic 
rites  and  revelations  found  new  and  ex- 
otic sources  of  gratification.  Slaves,  trad- 
ers, and  finally  soldiers  from  Hellenized 
Egypt,  Syria,  and  Asia  Minor,  carried 
their  gods  throughout  the  Mediterranean 
world,  and  even  beyond,  to  the  Atlantic 
Ocean,  to  Hadrian's  Wall  in  Britain,  to 
the  Rhine  and  Danube,  and  to  the  bor- 
ders of  the  African  desert.  The  invasion 
of  the  West  by  these  oriental  gods  began 
in  204  B.C.,  when,  in  answer  to  the 
Roman  Senate's  invitation,  the  Asiatic 
Great  Mother  of  the  Gods  took  up  her 


IMMORTALITY  35 

residence  in  Rome.  Many  other  divinities 
came  during  the  succeeding  centuries; 
but  three  remained  most  prominent :  the 
Great  Mother  of  the  Gods,  whom  I 
have  just  mentioned,  with  her  attend- 
ant Attis;  Egyptian  Isis  and  her  asso- 
ciate divinities,  who  were  worshipped  in 
Rome  as  early  as  Cicero's  day;  and 
the  Persian  Mithras,  whose  cult  became 
influential  in  the  West  toward  the  close 
of  the  first  century  of  our  era.^^  These 
religions  added  to  their  exotic  charm 
that  spell  which  great  age  casts  over 
men's  imaginations.  Osiris,  the  hus- 
band of  Isis,  had  been  lord  of  the  dead 
in  Egypt  for  more  than  two  thousand 
years;  Attis  and  the  Great  Mother  be- 
longed to  an  immemorial  antiquity; 
while  Mithras  had  his  origin  in  the  re- 
moter East,  at  a  period  to  which  neither 
Greek  nor  Roman  knowledge  ran.  More- 
over, Attis  and  Osiris,  like  Dionysus  and 
Persephone  among  the  Greeks,  or  the 


il 


^1 


1^^ 


' 


M 


1! 


36  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

Semitic  Adonis  and  Tammuz,  were  gods 
who  died  and  lived  again,  and  who  there- 
fore became  warrants  of  man's  immortal- 
ity. Mithras  belonged  to  another  class  of 
divinities.  He  was  held  to  be  the  bene- 
factor and  constant  supporter  of  man- 
kind. According  to  the  sacred  legend, 
he  had  himself  wrestled  with  the  powers 
of  darkness  and  had  established  civiliza- 
tion on  earth,  before  he  ascended  to 
heaven,  whence  he  was  believed  to  aid 
his  faithful  followers  in  their  constant 
struggle  against  the  servants  of  Ahri- 
man,  the  lord  of  wickedness. 

The  devotees  of  these  gods  formed 
sacred  communities,  admission  to  which 
was  obtained  by  secret  initiation;  the 
rituals  were  mysteries  in  which  the  de- 
votee had  pictured  to  him,  or  himself 
acted  out,  the  sacred  drama,  whereby 
he  received  assurance  of  divine  protec- 
tion here  and  of  a  happy  immortality 
hereafter.    The  initiate,  moreover,  was 


IMMORTALITY  37 

believed  to  experience  a  new  birth  and 
to  enter  into  union  with  his  god,  so  that 
he  became  Osiris-Serapis,  or  Attis,  or 
Mithras,  even  as  the  Dionysiac  devotee 
became  a  Bacchus. 

To  the  question  how  the  comforting 
assurance  of  present  safety  and  of  future 
immortality  was  given  the  initiate,  we 
can  return  no  more  satisfactory  answer 
than  we  can  make  in  the  case  of  the 
Greek  mysteries;  yet  we  may  get  some 
hint  from  the  words  which  the  Latin 
writer,  Apuleius,  puts  into  the  mouth  of 
his  hero,  Lucius,  who  was  initiated  into 
the  rites  of  Isis.  This  is  all  that  he 
might  tell:  ''  I  approached  the  bounds  of 
death.  I  trod  the  threshold  of  Proser- 
pina. I  was  carried  through  all  the  ele- 
ments and  returned  again  to  the  upper 
air.  At  dead  of  night  I  saw  the  sim 
glowing  with  a  brilliant  light.  The  gods 
of  heaven  and  of  hell  I  approached  in 
very  person   and   worshipped   face  to 


m 


i 


1 


38  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

face."^^     Obscure  as  these  words  are, 
much  is  plain.     In  some  way  the  de- 
I   votee  was  made  to  believe  that  he,  like 
}    Virgil's  hero,  had  passed  through  the 
I    world  of  the  dead  and  had  been  born 
,    again  into  a  new  life;   he  had  touched 
*   the  elements  —  earth,  air,  water,  and 
fire,  the  very  foundations  of  the  visi- 
ble cosmos;  he  had  seen  the  sun  which 
ever  shines  on  the  consecrated;  and  he 
I   had  been  granted  the  beatific  vision. 
Therefore  he  knew  that  his  salvation  was 
1    secure  forever. 

Furthermore  in  these  mystery  religions 
preparation  for  the  emotional  experi- 
ences of  initiation  was  made  by  means 
of  lustral  baths,  fasting,  abstinence,  and 
penance;  once  consecrated,  the  devotee 
supported  his  religious  life  by  following 
a  prescribed  regimen  and  by  participat- 
ing in  frequent  holy  offices;  degrees  of 
initiation  and  grades  of  office  marked  his 
advance  in  faithful  proficiency;    while 


IMMORTALITY  39 

1 

magic  words  and  formulae,  committed 
to  memory,  assured  him  a  safe  passage 
from  this  world  to  the  next. 

The  oriental  mysteries  enjoyed  a  wide- 
spread popularity,  except  in  Greece,  un- 
der the  Roman  Empire  down  to  the  latter 
half  of  the  third  century.  Then  they 
began  to  lose  their  hold  in  the  Roman 
provinces  before  the  growing  power  of 
Christianity;  yet  in  the  city  of  Rome 
they  stubbornly  held  their  ground  until 
the  end  of  the  fourth  century.  The  first 
St.  Peter's  was  built  hard  beside  a  shrine 
of  the  Great  Mother  of  the  Gods ;  there 
for  three-quarters  of  a  century  the  old 
and  the  new  mysteries  strove  in  con- 
scious rivalry,  until  at  last  Cybele  was 
forced  to  yield  to  Christ. 

The  last  centuries  before  the  birth  of 
Jesus  and  the  opening  centuries  of  our 
era  were  marked  by  an  increasing  relig- 
ious longing  and  unrest,  first  among  the 
Greeks  and  then  among  the  Romans. 


/ 


if 


/ 


40  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

There  was  a  weariness  and  a  dissatisfac- 
tion with  the  inherited  forms  of  religious 
expression ;  and  many  felt  a  sense  of  sep- 
aration from  God,  of  a  gulf  between  the 
human  and  the  divine,  which  they  hoped 
might  be  bridged  by  a  direct  revelation, 
by  a  vision,  which  would  grant  imme- 
diate knowledge  of  God.  These  eager 
desires  led  in  part  to  an  increase  in  super- 
stition and  credulity,  over  which  we  need 
not  now  pause;  in  part  to  the  resort  to 
the  oriental  mysteries  of  which  I  have 
just  spoken ;  and  in  part  to  a  revival  of 
Pythagorean  mysticism  and  of  mystic 
Platonism  among  the  intellectuals,  who 
no  longer  felt  that  the  reason  and  the 
will  gave  them  the  assurance  which  they 
required. 

The  later  mystic  philosophies  laid 
much  stress  on  an  ascetic  discipline  in 
this  life,  to  secure  the  soul's  purification, 
and  all  taught  that  the  great  end  of  man 
was  to  attain  to  the  knowledge  of  God, 


IMMORTALITY  41 

wherein  lay  man's  supreme  happiness. 
Such  knowledge,  it  was  thought,  could 
come  only  through  a  revelation.  Here 
these  philosophies  agreed  with  the  teach- 
ing of  the  oriental  mysteries,  and  in- 
deed with  popular  belief  as  well.  On 
the  question  of  the  immortality  of  the 
soul,  however,  the  later  mystics  brought 
forward  no  new  arguments.  Plotinus, 
the  greatest  of  the  Neoplatonists,  virtu- 
ally repeats  the  proofs  adduced  by  the 
founder  of  the  Academy  .^^  Undoubt- 
edly during  the  opening  centuries  of  the 
Christian  era  there  was  a  growing  beUef 
in  the  soul's  immortality,  or  at  least  an 
increasing  hope  of  a  future  life,  but  such 
hopes  and  beliefs,  outside  Christianity, 
were  not  based  on  new  arguments.  Plato 
had  once  for  all  in  antiquity,  suppUed 
the  philosophic  grounds  for  confidence. 
Only  in  modern  times  have  new  argu- 
ments of  any  weight  been  adduced. 


il 


li 


42  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

Let  us  now  pause  to  summarize  the 
results  of  the  considerations  which  have 
thus  far  occupied  us.  We  may  fairly  say 
that,  in  spite  of  popular  doubt,  intellect- 
ual scepticism,  and  philosophic  denial, 
beliefs  in  some  kind  of  existence  beyond 
the  grave  were  widespread  in  the  Greco- 
Roman  world  at  the  beginning  of  our 
era.  For  many,  probably  for  most,  be- 
lief did  not  advance  beyond  inherited 
intuitions,  fears,  or  hopes,  which  were 
fostered  by  tendance  of  the  dead,  pre- 
scribed by  immemorial  custom.  Many, 
both  the  simple  and  the  learned,  found 
their  assurance  in  diverse  forms  of  Greek 
mysteries;  others,  again,  strengthened 
to  endure  the  buff etings  of  this  life  by 
the  resolute  doctrines  of  Stoicism,  were 
satisfied  with  the  extended,  though  lim- 
ited, future  existence  vouchsafed  the 
virtuous;  while  the  later  Platonists,  re- 
turning to  the  mystic  Orphic-Pythago- 
rean elements  which  had  influenced  the 


IMMORTALITY 


43 


founder  of  their  school,  offered  their  dis- 
ciples arguments  in  favor  of  a  genuine 
immortality.  Under  the  Empire  the  sup- 
ports of  faith  became  more  numerous 
and  appealing.  At  the  lowest  end  of  the 
scale  were  charlatans,  as  there  had  been 
since  Plato's  day,^^  who  imposed  on  the 
fears  and  hopes  of  their  victims  for  their 
own  mercenary  ends.  Higher  were  those 
inspiring  Eastern  mysteries  which  were 
carried  to  the  remotest  provinces,  bind- 
ing their  devotees  by  initiation,  ritual 
service,  and  a  prescribed  regimen,  more 
constantly  to  a  rehgious  Ufe  than  Greek 
mysteries  had  ever  done ;  and  the  great 
end  of  all  was  the  assurance  that  the 
souls  of  the  faithful  should  not  die,  but 
should  mount  to  the  upper  heavens  to  be 
at  one  with  God. 

The  last  vital  philosophy  of  antiquity 
was  Neoplatonism,  on  which  we  have 
just  touched;  the  chief  aim  of  the  Neo- 
platonist  also  was  to  secure  union  with 


I 


44 


PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 


the  Divine,  and  his  greatest  article  of 
faith  was  the  soul's  immortality.  If  this 
theosophic  philosophy  seem  to  any  of 
poor  account,  I  would  remind  him  that 
by  Origen  and  Augustine  Neoplatonism 
was  brought  into  Christian  thought, 
where  it  has  been  operative  ever  since. 

Ill 

In  view  of  the  facts  with  which  we 
have  been  occupied  we  shall  not  make 
the  error  of  thinking  that  Christianity 
brought  the  hope  of  immortaUty  among 
men,  for,  as  we  have  seen,  hope  —  nay, 
sure  confidence,  in  the  soul's  survival  was 
widespread  throughout  the  ancient  world 
when  Jesus  began  his  ministry.  What 
can  we  say  of  early  Christian  teaching, 
and  how  was  it  related  to  its  pagan 
environment  ? 

Christianity  grew  out  of  Judaism. 
Now  it  is  a  striking  fact  that  the  Jews 
were  later  than  most  of  the  peoples  about 


IMMORTALITY  45 

them  in  conceiving  of  individual  immor- 
taUty.^'    Clinging  to  monotheism  and 
absorbed  in  the  life  of  their  nation,  they 
had  cut  themselves  off  from  some  of  the 
ideas  developed  by  their  neighbors.    To 
follow  out  the  intricate  and  uncertain 
history  of  eschatological  ideas  among  the 
Jews  would  be  too  difficult  here.    We 
may  simply  say  that  when  Jesus  began 
his  ministry  a  considerable  part  of  the 
Jews  had  abandoned  the  expectation  of 
a  material  kingdom  of  God  and  looked 
forward  to  a  spiritual  kingdom  on  a 
transformed  earth  or  in  heaven.    In  this 
kingdom  those  would  share,  who  through 
God's  grace  and  their  own  righteousness 
had  won  a  place  therein;  but  the  wicked 
were  either  to  be  punished  forever  or 
to  be  utterly  destroyed.    To  these  ideas 
Jesus'  teaching  was  closely  related,  al- 
though he  gave  a  nobler  meaning  to  Jew- 
ish doctrine,  and  he  did  not  limit  the 
hope  of  a  future  existence  so  narrowly  as 


/ 


46  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

some  would  do.  Moreover,  he  adopted 
from  the  law  the  teaching  which  made 
salvation  and  future  happiness  depend 
on  a  love  for  God  and  for  one's  fellow- 
men,  which  would  result  in  an  unself- 
ish Ufe  of  righteousness.  Salvation,  he 
taught,  was  a  present  experience,  open 
to  every  man  who  conformed  to  the 
requirement. 

After  the  crucifixion  of  Jesus,  the 
Apostles  and  their  successors  naturally 
made  his  person,  death,  and  resurrection 
the  great  means  through  which  his  fol- 
lowers secured  salvation.  Paul,  more- 
over, taught  that  through  faith  —  using 
the  word  in  a  somewhat  unusual  sense  — 
the  believer  secured  the  actual  presence 
of  Christ  within  him,  entered  into  a 
mystic  union  with  the  divine  Saviour,  by 
which  the  man  was  freed  from  sin  and 
reborn  into  a  new  spiritual  life ;  this  new 
life  was  confirmed  by  the  indwelling 
Holy  Spirit  which  completed  the  man's 


IMMORTALITY  47 

moral  regeneration.  In  the  Fourth  Gos- 
pel we  find  a  similar  doctrine  of  a  mystic 
union  with  Christ,  secured  by  belief  in 
Him  as  the  incarnate  Word  —  a  belief 
which  brought  about  a  spiritual  rebirth 
and  therewith  gave  a  present  warrant  of 

eternal  life.^ 

It  is  unnecessary  for  our  present  pur- 
pose to  examine  the  beliefs  of  the  earliest 
Christians  as  to  the  resurrection  or  the 
second  coming  of  Christ,  which  they  ex- 
pected to  take  place  within  their  own 
time  — these  beliefs  and  many  others 
the  Apostolic  Church  derived  naturally 
from  their  Jewish  tradition  and  from  the 
teachings  of  Jesus.   I  shall  ask  you  rather 
to  focus  your  thought  on  the  fundamen- 
tal ideas  of  this  early  Christianity:  that 
is  to  say,  on  the  revelation  of  God,  the 
punishment  of  sin  by  suffering  or  annihi- 
lation, the  mystic  union  with  the  Divine, 
and  a  happy  inmiortality  as  a  reward 
for  faith  and  righteousness.    Were  these 


48  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

ideas  foreign  to  the  peoples  of  the  Medi- 
terranean area  ?  No,  our  survey  has 
reminded  us  that  on  the  contrary  they 
were  familiar  over  wide  stretches  of  the 
Greco-Roman  world. 

Do  not  misunderstand  me  here.  Of 
course  I  am  not  making  the  elementary 
blunder  of  saying  that  because  certain 
beliefs  of  the  Christians  and  the  Pagans 
were  similar,  they  therefore  were  iden- 
tical, or  that  they  were  derived  from 
one  another,  or  that  the  many  factors 
of  which  they  were  composed  were  the 
same.  No  one  with  any  knowledge  of 
the  history  of  religious  thought  could 
maintain  that.  But  the  point  which  I 
do  wish  to  emphasize  is  this,  viz. :  that 
the  eschatological  ideas  widely  current 
in  the  Mediterranean  world  were  such 
that  Christianity  found  a  favorable  en- 
vironment when  it  began  its  proselyting 
work.  This  seems  to  me  one  of  the  most 
significant  facts  in  the  relation  of  early 


IMMORTALITY  49 

Christianity  to  paganism.  The  Christian 
teachings  as  to  the  means  by  which  the 
assurance  of  a  happy  immortality  was  to 
be  secured  could  hardly  seem  very  strange 
at  first  hearing  to  any  one  who  was  famil- 
iar with  mystery  religions  or  with  much 
of  the  religious  philosophy  current  in  the 
pagan  world  during  the  early  Christian 
centuries.  Closer  examination  would  re- 
veal fundamental  differences  between 
Christian  belief  and  the  pagan  hope.  But 
it  is  not  insignificant  that  Christianity 
spread  most  rapidly  at  first  in  Syria  and 
Asia  Minor,  countries  long  famiUar  with 
those  mystic  religions,  which  had  prom- 
ised what  the  nobler  faith  suppUed. 

IV 

Although  we  now  have  examined  the 
conditions  which,  to  my  mind,  are  the 
most  significant  in  the  relation  of  pagan 
ideas  of  immortaUty  to  those  of  early 
Christianity,  there  yet  remain  matters 


50  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

which,  if  less  important,  are  still  of  more 
than  merely  curious  interest.  We  shall 
now  look  at  some  of  these  questions. 

What  notions  of  heaven  and  of  hell 
did  the  Greeks  and  Romans  have  ?  This 
inquiry  is  often  made.  The  reply  is 
easily  given.  Man  has  always  painted 
hell  and  paradise  after  his  own  concep- 
tion of  suffering  and  of  happiness,  just 
as  truly  as  he  has  made  God  after  his 
own  image.  Consequently  the  ancient's 
ideas  of  the  future  life  ranged  all  the  way 
from  the  grossest  materialistic  concepts 
to  highly  spiritualized  beliefs.  Plato  in 
the  Republic  makes  Adeimantus  say 
that  some  seem  to  think  that  an  immor- 
taHty  of  drunkenness  is  virtue's  highest 
meed.^^  But  Socrates  conceived  the  fu- 
ture state  to  be  something  very  differ- 
ent ;  a  place  in  which  he  could  hold  high 
discourse  with  the  great  ones  of  the  past.^^ 
In  general,  however,  punishment  and  re- 
wards were  of  a  material  sort,  for  such 


IMMORTALITY  51 

are  most  easily  imagined  and  understood. 
Has  it  been  otherwise  with  Christians  ? 
The  answer  is  to  be  found  in  Christian 
apocalypses,  medieval  monuments,  re- 
naissance art,  and  in  our  own  minds.  Of 
course  there  developed  in  Greek  thought 
what  we  might  call  an  orthodox  geogra- 
phy and  scheme  for  the  other  world,  of  I 
which  Virgil  gives  us  a  just  picture.  In-  1  | 
teresting  as  it  might  prove  to  examine 
the  details  of  this  picture,  we  will  rather 
turn  to  other  matters. 

When  Christianity  spread  among  the 
Gentiles,  it  at  once  came  under  influences 
which  inevitably  left  their  marks  in  its 
thought  and  practice.  Let  me  offer  two 
illustrations. 

Early  in  the  hour  I  spoke  of  Aeneas' 
journey  through  the  lower  world  as  an  \ 
initiation  by  which  he  was  enlightened  | 
and  strengthened  for  the  great  task  that  ; 
lay  before  him;  and  we  have  now  seen  , 
that  in  all  the  mysteries,  both  Greek  and 


' 


52  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

oriental,  there  were  initiatory  rites,  in 
which  the  novice  symboHcally  died  to  the 
old  life  and  was  born  again  into  a  new 
existence.  Moreover,  through  his  emo- 
"tional  experience  he  received  assurance 
that  his  salvation  was  secure  forever. 
The  idea  of  the  new  birth  belongs  to 
Christianity  also  from  the  first.  Paul 
held  that  it  was  brought  about  by  faith; 
the  author  of  the  Fourth  Gospel  taught 
that  it  was  secured  by  love  and  belief. 
Baptism  in  primitive  Christianity  was 
at  first  Symbolical  —  an  act  of  ritual 
purification,  which  was  believed  to  indi- 
cate the  remission  of  sins  and  the  be- 
stowal of  the  Holy  Spirit.^^  But  by  the 
second  century  Christianity  had  become 
a  mystery  in  the  Greek  sense,  into  which 
the  novice,  after  a  period  of  preparation, 
was  duly  initiated  by  baptism;  and 
indeed  the  act  was  believed  to  have 
a  magic  power  to  secure  immortality, 
closely  parallel  to  that  of  the  pagan  in- 


IMMORTALITY  S3 

itiation.^^  We  all  know  that  the  eccle- 
siastical confidence  which  such  belief 
inspires  is  far  from  unknown  today. 

Again  you  will  recall  that  when  Anchi- 
ses'  shade  was  instructing  Aeneas  in  the 
meaning  of  life  and  death,  he  said : 

"  Nor  when  to  life's  last  beam  they  bid  farewell 
May  sufferers  cease  from  pain,  nor  quite  be 

freed 
From  aU  their  fleshly  plagues ;  but  by  fixed  law, 
The  strange,  inveterate  taint  works  deeply  in. 
For  this,  the  chastisement  of  evils  past 
Is  suffered  here,  and  full  requital  paid. 
Some  hang  on  high,  outstretched  to  viewless 

winds; 
For  some  their  sin's  contagion  must  be  purged 
In  vast  ablution  of  deep-rolling  seas, 
Or  burned  away  in  fire.    Each  man  receives 
His  ghostly  portion  in  the  world  of  dark." 

Thus  the  sojourn  of  the  soul  in  the  world 
below  for  the  thousand  years  which  must 
elapse  before  it  could  be  born  again,  was 
a  period  of  cleansing  from  ancient  sin. 
This  idea  of  purification  we  have  already 


1 


54  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

seen  to  be  as  old  as  the  Orphics;  it  was 
made  an  important  element  by  Plato; 
and  indeed  all  who  held  to  the  doctrine 
of  rebirths  regarded  the  periods  between 
earthly  existences  as  times  of  moral  pun- 
ishment and  cleansing.    There  were  cer- 
tain analogies  in  Mithraism.    Orthodox 
Christianity  could  not  adopt  the  doc- 
trine of  metempsychosis,  although  some 
Gnostics  found  this  possible,  by  reject- 
ing the  resurrection  of  the  body.    But 
beyond  question  the  Greek  doctrine  of 
post-mortem  purgation  from  sin,  com- 
bining with  ideas  inherited  from  the  Old 
Testament,  has  been  influential  in  the 
development  of  a  Christian   belief  in 
purification,  especially  by  fire,  in  an  in- 
termediate  state   between    death   and 
paradise.    The  doctrine  of  purgatory,  in 
somewhat  different  forms,  has  been  held 
by  both  the  Eastern  and  the  Western 
Churches.    Although  this  doctrine  did 
not  become  a  definite  part  of  the  theol- 


' 


IMMORTALITY  55 

ogy  of  the  Western  Church  until  the 
time  of  Gregory  the  Great  (590-604), 
nevertheless  traces  of  it  can  be  found  in 
the  earlier  Church  writers.  Origen  held 
that  even  the  perfect  must  pass  through 
fire  after  death;  ^^  St.  Augustine  was 
less  confident,  but  he  thought  it  not  past 
belief  that  imperfect  souls  might  be 
saved  by  cleansing  flames.^^  The  West- 
ern Church,  from  St.  Thomas  Aquinas 
in  the  thirteenth  to  Bellarmino  in  the 
sixteenth  century  held  the  doctrine  that 
the  cleansing  fire  was  as  material  as  that 
of  any  Stoic;  but  today  that  view  has 
in  large  part  been  abandoned.^^ 

These  two  illustrations  must  suffice  to 
suggest  the  ways  in  which  Christian 
thought  was  influenced  by  its  pagan 
environment. 

Finally  we  will  consider  an  example 
of  parallelism  between  pagan  and  Chris- 
tian ideas.  It  is  evident  that  the  Greeks, 
who  made  such  large  use  of  successive 


S6  PAGAN  IDEAS  OF 

rebirths,  following  periods  of  punish- 
ment and  purification  below,  thought  of 
these  repeated  lives  and  deaths  as  form- 
ing a  moral  series,  so  that  moral  progress, 
or  degeneracy,  at  one  stage  was  insepar- 
ably connected  with  both  the  preceding 
and  the  following  stages.  To  them  life 
here  and  life  in  the  other  world  were 
indissolubly  bound  together.  This  was 
also  as  true  of  Stoicism  with  its  limited 
reward  for  uprightness,  as  it  was  of  Pla- 
tonism.  The  Greek  mysteries,  which  did 
not  concern  themselves  with  metempsy- 
chosis, by  the  fifth  century  before  our 
era  likewise  made  future  happiness  de- 
pend in  part  at  least  on  righteousness  in 
this  life ;  the  oriental  mysteries  too  made 
this  existence  the  condition  of  the  next. 
In  short,  we  may  say  that  wherever  men 
believed  in  any  kind  of  a  future  exist- 
ence, they  almost  universally  held  to  the 
common  belief  that  future  happiness  was 
to  be  the  reward  of  a  virtuous  life  on 


IMMORTALITY  57 

earth.  But  this  is  one  of  the  fundamental 
principles  of  Christianity.  Paganism, 
therefore,  was  in  accord  on  this  point 
with  its  enemy,  and  thereby  favored  the 
propagation  of  the  new  religion;  more- 
over, the  superior  ethical  demands  of 
Christianity  and  its  humanitarian  prin- 
ciples no  doubt  found  a  ready  response, 
especially  in  enlightened  circles. 

So  we  have  returned  to  that  which 
seems  to  me  most  important  in  the 
relations  of  paganism  and  of  early 
Christianity.  In  many  ways  paganism 
provided  an  environment  favorable  for 
the  spread  of  the  religion  which  Jesus 
founded.  The  two  were  at  many  points 
irreconcilable,  and  the  former  has  not 
always  benefited  the  latter  by  its  influ- 
ence; but  it  is  a  grave  historical  error 
not  to  recognize  the  areas  in  which  the 
thought  of  the  two  ran  parallel.  Is  the 
nobler  faith  the  poorer  because  its  paths 
were  made  broad  by  the  pagan  in  his 
search  after  Immortality  ? 


i  it 


I 


NOTES 


\ 


NOTES 

1.  Eduard  Norden,  AeneiSy  Buck  VI y  Leipzig, 
1903,  is  most  useful  for  its  commentary,  especially 
on  religious  and  philosophic  matters. 

2.  W.  Warde  Fowler,  The  Religious  Experience      j 
of  the  Roman  Peopky  Macmillan  Co.,  1911,  pp.     / 

419  ff.  ^ 

So  Dante's  journey  through  Hell,  Purgatory, 
and  Paradise  secured  his  conversion  and  salvation, 
bringing  him  finally  to  freedom  and  to  knowledge. 
Paradisoy  XXXI,  85-87  and  XXXIII  entire. 

3 .  Metempsychosis  was  the  subject  of  the  Inger- 
soll  lecture  by  Professor  George  Foot  Moore  in 
1914.    Therefore  that  theme  is  not  discussed  here. 

4.  Cf.  Friedlander,  Roman  Life  and  Manners, 
Routledge,  London,  1910,  iii,  chap.  II. 

5.  On  the  pre-Hellenic  periods,  see  Schuch- 
hardt,  Schliem^nn's  Excavations,  New  York,  1891, 
passim;  Lagrange,  La  Crete  Ancienne,  Paris,  1908, 
chap.  II;  Baikie,  The  Sea-Kings  of  Crete ,  London, 
1 910,  chap.  XL 

6.  Cf.  Fairbanks,  Greek  Religiony  New  York, 
1910,  pp.  168-188;  Stengel,  Griechische  Kidtusd- 
tertumery  2d  ed.,  Munich,  1898,  §  80;  Wissowa, 
Religion  und  Kultus  der  Romery  2d  ed.,  Munich, 
191 2,  §  36;  W.  Warde  Fowler,  Religious  Experi- 
ence of  the  Roman  Peopky  London,  1911,  passim; 
and  especially  Lecture  XVII,  "  Mysticism  —  Ideas 


62 


NOTES 


of  the  Future  Life;  "  C.  Pascal,  Le  Credenze  dVl- 
tretombaj  2  vols.,  191 2. 

7.  B.  I.  Wheeler,  Dionysos  and  Immortality, 
IngersoU  Lecture  for  1898-99.  The  classic  work  on 
Orphism  is  Rohde,  Psyche:  Seelencult  und  Un- 
sterblichkeitsglaube  der  Griechen,  3d  ed.,  Tubingen, 
1903,  vol.  ii. 

8.  Frg.  154  Abel. 

9.  Apparently  Orphism  was  already  established 
at  Croton  in  southern  Italy  when  Pythagoras  ar- 
rived there  about  5^  B.C.;  but  the  matter  is  very 
uncertain.  It  is  cl^r  that  Orphism  and  Pythag- 
oreanism  soon  coalesced,  even  if  they  were  origi- 
nally distinct. 

10.  Rep.,  vi,  508  f.  It  should  be  said  that  the 
identity  of  Plato's  supreme  idea  with  God  is  denied 
by  some  Platonists;  but  cf.  Phil.  22  c;  Tim.  28  A- 

29  E,  57  A,  92  c. 

11.  The  doctrine  of  ideas  is  developed  in  the 
Phaedo,  Phaedrus,  Meno,  Symposium,  and  espe- 
cially in  the  Republic.  In  the  Sophist  and  the 
Parmenides,  Plato  criticizes  his  own  views  acutely. 

12.  Metaphys.,  i,  9;  vi,  8;  xii,  10;  xiii,  3. 

13.  Phaedrus,  245  (cf. Laws, x,  894 b  ff., xii,  966 e)  ; 
Phaedo,  72  ff.,  86,  105;  Meno,  81  ff. 

14.  Diss.,  i,  14,  6;  ii,  8,  11. 

15.  Cf.  E.  V.  Arnold,  Roman  Stoicism,  Univer- 
sity Press,  Cambridge  (Eng.),  1911,  chap.  XL 

16.  Rohde,  Psyche,  ii^,  379  ff. 

17.  CIL.,  ii,  1434;  cf.  1877,  2262. 

18.  CIL.,  v,  1939. 

19.  CIL.,  vi,  14672  =Ins.  Graec,  xiv,  1746. 


NOTES 


63 


20.  CaU.,  Epig.,  13,  3  ff. 

21.  C/L.,iii,  5825;  vi,  9280, 10848;  x,67o6;  etc. 

22.  ^ew.jvi,  723-751.  Translation  by  Theodore 
C.  Wilhams,  Houghton  Mifflin  Company,  Boston, 
1908. 

23.  On  these  mysteries,  see  Rohde,  Psyche,  i^, 
pp.  278  ff.;  Famell,  Cults  of  the  Greek  States,  iii, 
126-213;  A.  Mommsen,  Feste  der  Stadt  Athen, 
pp.  204-277,  405-421. 

24.  480  f. 

25.  Frg.  137. 

26.  Frg.  753. 

27.  454  ff. 

28.  Eph.  Arch.,  iii  {iSS3),P- Si,  S. 

29.  On  these  and  other  oriental  gods,  see  F. 
Cumont,  The  Oriental  Religions  in  Roman  Pagan- 
ism,  Chicago,  1911;  also  G.  Showerman,  The  Great 
Mother  of  the  Gods,  1901;  Hepding,  Attis,  1903; 
W.  Budge,  Osiris  and  the  Egyptian  Resurrection, 
2  vols.,  1911;  G.  A.  Reisner,  The  Egyptian  Con- 
ception of  Immortality,  IngersoU  Lecture  for  1911; 
F.  Cumont,  Textes  et  Monuments  relatifs  aux 
Mysteres  de  Mithra,  2  vols.,  1894-1900;  Id.,  Les 
Mysteres  de  Mithra,  2  ed.,  1902;  English  transla- 
tion, 1 9 10. 

30.  Apuleius,  Metamorphoses,  xi,  23. 

31.  Enn.,  iv,  7. 

32.  Cf.  Plato,  Rep.,  364  Bff.;  Demosth.,  xviu, 
259;  Apul.,  Met.,  viii,  24  ff. 

33.  R.  H.  Charles,  A  Critical  History  of  the  Doc- 
trine of  a  Future  Life  in  Israel,  in  Judaism,  and 


64 


NOTES 


in  Christianity  J  London,  1899,  is  a  convenient  book, 
but  one  which  must  be  used  with  caution. 

34.  A.  HamaCk,  Lehrhuch  der  DogntengeschichtCy 
i,  4th  ed.,  1909;  English  translation  from  the  third 
German  edition,  1901;  G.  B.  Stevens,  The  The- 
ology of  the  New  Testament y  1903;  H.  Holtzmann, 
Lehrhuch  der  neutestamentlichen  Theologie^  2  vols., 
2d  ed.,  1911. 

35.  i?e/^.,  ii,  363  D. 

36.  ApoL,  41. 

37.  It  should  be  said  that  even  in  the  earliest 
period  Christian  baptism  had  certain  magical  no- 
tions attached  to  it;  not,  however,  the  belief  that 
it  secured  immortality. 

38.  Cf .  Hatch,  The  Influence  of  Greek  Ideas  and 
Usages  on  the  Christian  Churchy  x,  b;  Anrich,  Das 
antike  Mysterienwesen  in  seinem  Einfluss  auf  das 
Christentuniy  1894,  pp.  168  ff.,  especially  179  ff. 

39.  Horn,  in  Num.y  xxv;  in  Ps.  xxxvi,  3. 

40.  C.  D.y  XX,  25;  xxi,  13  (where  Virgil's  verses 
given  above  are  quoted),  26;  de  octo  Dulcitii 
Quaest.y  Qu,  i,  15;  Enchiridion,  Ixix. 

41.  St. Thomas,  Opera  (Venice,  1759),  xii,  p.  575, 
Distinctio  xxi,  Quaes,  i,  Sol.  3;  xiii,  p.  347  ff., 
Distinctio  xliv.  Quaes.  3,  Art.  4,  Quaestiunc.  3; 
Bellarmino,  de  Purgatorio,  II,  x-xii. 


\Jf 


iUV    d  i^^ 


COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARIES 


0021 


092338 


PRINTED  AT 

THE  HARVARD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

CAMBRIDGE,  MASS.,  U.  S.  A. 


(rtl 
ii'i 


'■  »^'  .-■ 


» 


!i 
••• 

i! 


i; 


|!> 


IM^ 


X 


V 


